“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players..They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” William Shakespeare | As You Like It | Act 2 Scene 7

William Shakespeare crafted it. Literary critics throughout the ages have toted it as prophetic genius, and it rings perhaps even more true now in the 21st century than it ever did when he wrote As You Like It in 1600 A.D. In taking inspiration from the great Will.I.Am, this week’s emerging media question probes a bit further tainting the above idea with an emerging media context…

How Are You Using Social Media to Interact Across the World’s Stage?

Do you tweet to friends in France about how your dreams to one day live abroad exotically? Do you swap emails with a Financial Analyst in Tokyo so that you know more about Asia’s financial context than your colleagues the next day at work? Do you follow a design blog that always releases funky and cool fonts from that artist you ran into on Twitter during a #fontfantic chat and then traded contact info with? Perhaps you’re even playing international fantasy football (aka Soccer) with a bunch of amigos in Spain since they will know how to trade players better than mates from England or Germany. Thanks to social networks and evolving technology, you’re talking victory moves with World Cup winners. You’re living in real time and digitally interacting across the World’s stage at the click of a mouse and the touch of a key. Freedom reigns supreme, information is abound, and new relationships are forming while you travel through life’s journey.

In an age when employees perform 3 jobs as 1 person, 9am to 7pm is status quo and mobile devices operate as smaller laptops – tracking history, memories, and older data also employs using social media to a certain extent. LinkedIn users can archive messages sitting in their Inbox, Facebook holds vaults of pictures from Spring Break, former birthday parties, and family, Yelp files Digital records and catalogues comments we left about the Asian restaurants we favored and hated for future reference. Again, every day life continues to interact at an increasing rate digitally through each of these mediums. Conversations are stemming from what we have in common and we’re finding out what we have in common with one another when we connect online in some way.

For now I want to leave these questions open for reader comments and observations. Share your stories, speculate on how society is using social media to interact across the world’s stage amongst various groups of players. What parts have you held journeying across the digital landscape? What role and where will you take on next? We’ll mull over some other examples about interacting through social media across the world stage. Think connectivity. Embrace it digitally.

Related

our dearest friends moved to stockholm almost two years ago. you could say we’re in regular contact through email and facebook. they follow my class blog, and i follow the blog they started when the arrived in stockholm. though we miss them tremendously, sometimes it feel like we’re sitting right across from them thanks to skype. i’d never skype before, but i love it. i love that i feel like they are in the same room with me. we usually skype for a couple of hours. the time flies by because we wind up sharing our photos via the desktop sharing. we’ll see them in stockholm next summer, but until then we’ll keep skyping.

Social media is bringing use closer than before. If I want to see my family all the way on another continent all I have to do is click a couple of keys on my lap top and there are their smiling faces on my screen.

I would have to say that is this one of the main things that I enjoy about social media….the means to communicate with my family where ever they may be.

Of course I have to play devil’s advocate and ask, what of the drawbacks? The expectation is that the stage is never dark, the lights are on 24/7. Opting out is one option, but what are the consequences of this? How might the stage be effectively managed so that the players do not end up feeling like tired puppets?

I’ve got a question, if all the world’s a stage (and indeed it is) then who’s in the audience? I find the role of consumer/producer aka amateurism aka prosumerism afforded by social media fascinating. Just last night I watched a television interview with Perez Hilton talking about how just a few short years ago he was a receptionist with a snarky little hobby blog. Now,while he’s no Rupert Everett, I think few could argue that sir Hilton (or madame Hilton as he may prefer) is not an influential pop culture icon. And his influence is not limited to the blogosphere. That’s really remarkable. Here the audience literally bum-rushed the stage. I wonder if that is the future of all content. If indeed we are all destined to be producers (maybe/maybe not with the reach of Hilton) and consumers simultaneously. If so, does there exist anymore a line between the amateur and professional?

I use social media not online to keep up with my friends here in the states both local and long distance, but I also use social media to learn new languages and keep up with penpals from around the world. I have several friends in Germany, Switzerland, and Japan that I follow through Twitter and Facebook, and then I’m a member of some more specialized networks like lang8 for language learning. Without these tools, I wouldn’t have gotten to meet many of these people, and I wouldn’t be as comfortable speaking casually in foreign languages 😛